by Clive James
A necessary conclusion, about the large and well-informed German-speaking audience for the arts, would be that if they were all eliminationist anti-Semites, they must have been strangely ready to sideline their otherwise overmastering prejudice when it came to matters of aesthetic enjoyment. It’s not a conclusion that Goldhagen feels bound to draw, because he doesn’t even consider the matter. Nor does he consider that the abuse heaped on Jewish artists by the Nazi propaganda machine before the Machtergreifung was a measure of the success they had achieved in becoming a part of the landscape. Finally and fatally, he doesn’t consider that the massive and irreversible damage done to German-speaking culture by the repression, expulsion and murder of the Jews was the full, exact and tragic measure of how they had been vital to it. Once again it is an awful thing to find oneself saying, but it has to be said: the Reichskültur-kammer, if it were still in business, couldn’t have done a better job of treating the Jewish contributors to German culture as if they had been an irrelevance, simply begging to be swept away.
But a young historian can be forgiven for lacking the kind of cultural information that would bring such questions to the forefront. The richness of what the German-speaking Jews achieved before the Nazi era takes time to assess. Harder to understand is Goldhagen’s apparent supposition that nothing much has happened in Germany since the Nazi era when it comes to his own field – history. You would never know, from his book, that whole teams of German historians, in the full knowledge that they are trying to make bricks from rubble, have dedicated themselves to the study of the catastrophe that distorted their intellectual inheritance. As in any other country at any time, there have been a few historians who have devoted prodigious resources to missing the point. Of the star revisionists mixed up in the Historikerstreit, Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber at least had the merit of being too blatant to be plausible: they pretty well blamed the Holocaust on the Soviet Union. Klaus Hildebrand and Michael Stürmer were more insidious because there was nothing wrong with their facts: after the Red Army crossed the German border, the retreating Wehrmacht really was fighting heroically for its country’s heritage. Unfortunately their suggestion that post-war German patriotism might thus claim a solid base was hopelessly compromised by the consideration that part of the heritage was the Holocaust. In his various essays and open letters about the Historikerstreit, Jürgen Habermas (who, it is only fair to concede, admires Goldhagen’s book) was marvellous on the equivocations and the delusions of the revisionists, but on the main point he didn’t need to be marvellous: it was too obviously true. The revisionist historian can’t reasonably hope to have a Germany that is not obsessed with the past. There can be no putting off shame to achieve maturity. The shame is the maturity.
Most of the German historians are well aware of this. The revisionists did not prevail, and the work entailed in rebutting them had already become part of the accumulated glory of Germany’s indigenous historical studies as the terrible twentieth century neared its end. But if German culture really had been nourished at its root by eliminationist anti-Semitism, as Goldhagen argues, it is hard to see why so many of today’s German historians should now be so concerned about the Holocaust. Very few of them are Jews, for sadly obvious reasons. Surely they, too, are ‘the Germans’, as Goldhagen would like to put it. It can only follow that their culture has other continuities apart from the one that Goldhagen picks out. Their urge to comprehend, their respect for the facts – these things could not have started up all by themselves, out of nowhere.
There are plenty of Germans, naturally enough, who would like to think that their country as they know it today has started up out of nowhere. For those who would like to throw off the burden of history and move on, Goldhagen’s book has been a welcome gift. Purporting to bring the past home to the unsuspecting present, he has had the opposite effect. If he has not yet asked himself why his book has received such an enthusiastic reception in Germany, he might ponder why ‘the Germans’ should be so glad to be supplied with the argument that their parents and grandparents were all equally to blame because they inhabited a culture blameworthy in itself: we’re different now. But nobody is that different now, because nobody was that different then. It will always suit the current generation of any country to blame the turpitude of their ancestors on the culture then prevailing, as if people had no choice how to act. It saves us from the anguish of asking ourselves how we might have acted had we been there, at a time when plenty of people knew there was a choice, but couldn’t face the consequences of making it, and when those who did choose virtue were volunteers for torture and death.
No wonder Goldhagen is so popular. On top of leaving out the large numbers of German citizens who declined to vote for the Nazis even when there was almost no other party remaining with credible means to stop the chaos in the streets, he doesn’t even mention the Germans who were so suicidally brave as to defy the Nazis after they came to power. Sacrificial witnesses to human decency, they died at the rate of about twenty-five people per day for every day that the Third Reich was in existence. They might seem to add up to a drop in the bucket, and it was terribly true that they had no real hope of having any effect, but Goldhagen is keeping questionable company when he treats a handful of powerless lives as if their deaths meant nothing in the eye of history. Some of the questionable company he is keeping is alive now. We would all find life a lot easier if we didn’t have to ask ourselves how we would have measured up to the same test. Hence the temptation to suppose that nobody ever did. The challenge to one’s compassion is tough enough, without compounding it by the challenge to one’s conscience.
In our time and privileged surroundings there has been no such examination to pass or fail, but what makes the difference is political circumstances. The new Germany is a democracy. So was the old Germany, or it tried to be: but then the Nazis got in, and Hell broke loose. It can break loose anywhere, in any people: all peoples have hellish propensities. When Daniel J Goldhagen has lived long enough to value democracy for what it prevents, he will be less ready to be astonished by what his fellow human beings are capable of when they are allowed. And the Germans really are his fellow human beings. To assert otherwise is to further the kind of argument which the Nazis, thereby achieving their sole lasting value, contrived to discredit beyond redemption.
2001
WRITERS IN THEIR TIME
MARK TWAIN, JOURNALIST
Two volumes of the Library of America containing all that matters of Mark Twain’s journalism – Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays is the title – came out last autumn, and have kept at least one reader going ever since, with the occasional pause to consult the two volumes of Twain’s major writings which were published in the same format a decade or so ago. There is an almost audible clicking into place: this covetable quartet of books gangs up like gauge blocks, those machine-shop measures that don’t need anything except their trueness to keep them together. At least two more Twain volumes are yet to come, but for now it’s hard to imagine a set more satisfactory than this – four volumes just as neat as all the others in the Library of America, and even more solid, energetic, genial and creative: it makes a good gift suggestion for the new Administration. If President Clinton is a better speechmaker than President Bush, it is mainly because he steals better stuff. He should steal from the best: Mark Twain, who could rock the room for an hour while talking nothing except sense, and would have staved off Arsenio Hall without needing a saxophone.
For some years, it has been becoming clearer that the Library of America is the symbol for itself that the United States has long been in search of. Colonial Williamsburg is too Disneyfied to stand for tradition, Disneyland too childish to stand for innovation, Mt Rushmore too big to stand in your living room. You can line up the Library of America on a few shelves. Of course, the French could do the same sort of thing earlier. The Pléiade was the library that Edmund Wilson had in mind when he caned the Modern Language Association for burying the country’s
intellectual heritage while pretending to preserve it, sponsoring volumes that owed too much to pedantry, not enough to readability, weighed a ton, and looked like hell. Wilson kept up the campaign for a long time but seemed to stand no better chance of winning it than of beating his income-tax rap. Then the Library of America made Wilson’s dream happen. From its first few volumes it was obvious that the Library of America had struck the ideal balance between authority and portability. Its volumes begged irresistibly to be picked up, like brilliant children.
Remarkably, they didn’t lose this unthreatening quality even as they multiplied. If you own more than about thirty of the sixty-five volumes so far, monumentality becomes a present danger: the massed black jackets loom like midnight, and it starts to look as if the Pléiade had chosen better – first, to wear white, and then, when that started looking like a cliff of snow, to let the horizontally striped gold-blocked spines show through a transparent jacket, like scaling ladders to a Fabergé Bastille of imprisoned wisdom. But you can always alleviate the pangs of gazing at a wall of uniformity by taking one of the Library of America volumes down and letting it fall open in the hand. If this is dignity, it is user-friendly. And with these two volumes of Twain’s minor writings here is the original, unashamed vitality that lies at the heart of the whole enterprise. You could just about convince yourself that Huckleberry Finn was a work of literature in the Old World style, aimed at a refined public – after all, it certainly has the rank, if not the manner. But Twain’s journalism is a daunting reminder that he was ready to lavish everything he had on everybody, every time. He was democratic all the way down to his metabolism. For Twain, there was no division between democracy and creativity. They were versions of the same thing: exuberance.
Twain’s fugitive pieces have been collected before; but now we have, with just the right amount of critical apparatus, the authoritative texts, and all arranged chronologically, so that we can watch him grow. He grew like bamboo in the rain. His first hit was a newspaper sketch called ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog’. Twain wasn’t the first American journalist to write tall tales under a pen name; Petroleum V. Nasby, whom Twain knew and admired, was one of several practitioners already in the field. Nor was Twain the first to combine the high style with the low, squandering highfalutin resources on a shaggy-dog story. What was new, attention-getting, and instantly popular was the quality of the evocation when he worked the switch out of mandarin diction into the concrete vernacular.
The story of the Jumping Frog is told to Twain by a yarn-spinner – ‘good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler’ – who isn’t afraid to be boring: ‘Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair – and then sat down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph.’ Twain is true to his word: Wheeler is what the British would call a crasher. His story of Jim Smiley and the Jumping Frog goes on for pages before it even gets to the frog. Much more of it would put the reader to sleep, even though Twain the narrator makes it clear that the verbosity belongs to his interlocutor, not to him. But Wheeler’s drone goes on just long enough to ensure that we are given the set-up for the story without suspecting how funny it’s going to get. We hear that Jim Smiley, who owns the champion jumping frog, suckers himself into a bet with a hustler who appears to know nothing about frogs. But while Smiley is out of the room (Twain rather muffs this bit: we don’t find out Smiley has left the room until after we are told about how the stranger works his trick) the stranger fills Jim’s precious frog with a meal of lead shot. At just the moment when the champion frog gets the cue to unleash its usual stunning jump, Wheeler’s long-winded vocabulary snaps into focus. The champion frog ‘give a heave, and hysted up his shoulders – so – like a Frenchman, but it wasn’t no use – he couldn’t budge; he was planted as solid as a anvil.’ The anvil is good, but Twain’s mentor, Artemus Ward, might have done it. The Frenchman’s shrug is what makes it Twain. You can see it happening.
The Jumping Frog story was reprinted in periodicals all over the United States following its publication in 1865, and two years later it was the keynote piece of Twain’s first collection, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. Twain was disappointed with the way the book’s publication was handled, and was further miffed to find that it didn’t sell very well, but the Jumping Frog had already done its job in the periodicals. The young Mark Twain was made, and so was a tradition. It was a comic tradition, but now more than ever that shouldn’t be taken to mean that it was merely humorous. Every subsequent American humour writer writes in the range of tones established by Twain. When Thurber says of his fellow economics student the football player Bolenciecwcz that ‘while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter,’ he is in touch with Twain. Even so cosmopolitan a pasticheur as S. J. Perelman, whose macaronic vocabulary seems bent on superseding provincialism as its first impulse, sounds, when he has a picture to evoke, like Twain talking. There is a Perelman story that begins with the narrator waiting for his date to show up. The story goes off somewhere else, and long after we have forgotten about the date she finally appears, ‘sobbing drunk with a Marine on either arm’.
That instant of clarity, with all the baroque vocabulary suddenly forgotten, wouldn’t have been the same if Twain hadn’t first written such pieces as his tour-de-force diatribe of 1882, ‘The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm’, in which the new burglar-alarm system makes the house so attractive to burglars that they come to live there, until there is ‘not a spare bed in the house; all occupied by burglars’. The burglars take the alarm system, along with everything else. You could be watching the characters accumulate in the New Old Lompoc House, W. C. Fields’ favoured hostel in ‘The Bank Dick’, or – to go beyond America, as Twain’s influence almost immediately did – you could be listening to Stephen Leacock talking about his first bank account, or Henry Lawson telling his story about the Loaded Dog, the dog that got its teeth fastened into a bomb and terrorized a mining camp. Leacock was active in Canada and Lawson was an Australian determined to free the natural speech of his countrymen from the thralldom of literary preciosity. Twain’s style had reached both of them, and in America it was all-pervasive almost from the start.
Unfortunately, American humour, like every other American product, has long since paid the inevitable penalty attached to any consumable in a society of abundance. There are so many choices that they all seem the same. It isn’t really like that – nobody sane has to watch the comedy channel all the time it’s on the air – but it seems like that. There is a humour glut, as if being funny were an escape from reality. Twain never thought so. For him, humour was a way – and just one of the ways – to escape from unreality. He wanted to get the whole of life into his most casual work. He was a comic writer in the classic sense: Dante’s divinely inspired cosmos was a comedy because it mixed low speech with high, the profane with the sacred. In that sense, even Shakespeare’s tragedies were comedies. Twain was in the recognizable position of the storyteller who emerges during the formative history of his country and helps to provide its characteristic voice, thereby incidentally reinforcing the general rule that genius arrives early. Twain and Dickens, in their public position so similar – best-selling authors who electrified audiences when they read aloud – were different in this: Dickens was only metaphorically creating a world, whereas Twain was literally creating a nation.
Perhaps re-creating would be a better word. Like Shakespeare arriving after Bloody Mary left, Twain was lucky in his timing. The new nation looked as if it had just finished destroying itself, in the Civil War. The young Twain had managed to stay out of the war’s way. In ‘The Private History of a Campaign That Failed’, a piece written in 1885, he looks back twenty-five years to the young man he was when history suddenly boiled up all around him. As slaveowners went, Twain’s family had been liberal and even enlightened, but when the war started Twain didn’t hesitate to join a small volunteer group of Confederate riders hiding
out in the woods. He just hesitated about what to do next. So did they all. One night, a strange rider materialized from the direction of the Union camp. Twain had a sixth share in shooting him down – or, anyway, he remembered it that way. That was enough for him. He faded away to the West. If President Clinton gets this set of books as a birthday gift from his wife, he will find consolation here, because if Twain didn’t know what to do about a war that split the nation’s heart he did know what to do about healing the wound. When that war was over and he started to publish in earnest, he treated the two sides as if they belonged together. Not that he spread any soft soap. He was fierce on the liberal issues. Mrs Clinton will find her spirit here, too: perhaps the President should give her the gift.
Twain’s journalism is full of contempt for racism in all its forms. Like Swift, he had a low opinion of the human race in general, reserving his admiration for individuals. He was not much given to admiring ethnic authenticity, but he condescended on a cultural basis rather than a racial one. For any creed or colour that was being persecuted he was a vocal champion. Chinese immigrants given a bad time by the locals could count on one kind voice, at least. His initial sympathy for America’s Cuba adventure was based on his contempt for Spain’s horrific colonial record, which was almost as bad as its domestic record. When the United States began to show Spanish tendencies in the Philippines, Twain soon started condemning American colonialism, too. As with the Spanish, so with any other European nation: he was always ready to point out that the Old World had dirty hands. Belgium’s depredations in the Congo survived the invective of Roger Casement, but King Leopold II’s reputation was settled forever by Twain’s ‘King Leopold’s Soliloquy’, which had Leopold performing absurd mental gymnastics to disown the atrocities committed in his name.
